Wizards of the Coast: Discoveries Plug

There are a couple of books I'm looking forward to in 2008 (such as the Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by Ellen Datlow and The Best Science-Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Vol. 2 by Jonathan Strahan) but a new line I'm anticipating is Wizards of the Coast's Discovery line which will feature a variety of well-known and not-so-well-known authors and hopefully an even wider variety of fiction (that's definitely, at the very least, different from their usual D&D-fare fiction). I'm rooting for these guys because they could easily be the sleeper-hits of 2008.

One of the authors I'm eagerly anticipating in that particular line is JM McDermott and Last Dragon is going to be his first novel. I have an ARC copy of the book with me right now and I'm 3/4 through the book but I fell in love with it in the first few pages and it's honestly a great and unconventional read. You can read more about his experiences with the book here. Be sure to watch out for it in February!

Richard Dansky is the first author in the line who's getting published and his book Firefly Rain will be out by January 8, 2008. There's are book reviews over at Horror Reader and Library Journal. Over at Storytellers Unplugged, Dansky expounds on his experience being two weeks away from publication.

Come April is Devil's Cape by Rob Rogers. There are a couple of articles on his novel out there in the wild such as Nola.com, The Monster Librarian, and Publishers Weekly. You can ask him questions about the book over at his blog.

Melanie Tem and Steve Rasnic Tem won various awards for their novella The Man on the Ceiling and it's now expanded into a novel. The book will be coming out on March 4, 2008.

There might just be four books listed at the Wizards of the Coast site so far but there's at least one more book in the same line that's going to be published next year. Ari Marmell, an author whose made a name for himself in the RPG industry, will be having his non-Ravenloft novel Shades of Grey published. You can read more about it in his blog post and watch out for it in August of 2008.